Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the human race, led by the scientific establishment, has fallen under the spell of the Dunning Kruger Effect. By this I mean, our understanding of the material world advanced rapidly after the Dark Ages, leading us to become arrogant. Today we are more ignorant of what we are ignorant of… than in any other time in human history. Even as we have the least wise leaders ever… they have in their hands the tools to wipe humanity from the Earth. No way that could go sideways. I predict in the next century, humanity will discover something that will shake the very foundations of “science,” and our understanding of reality. Which will lead to a collapse of our arrogance, following the Dunning Kruger curve… then we can begin the long climb to actual competence.
The Dunning Kruger Effect is the idea that when we first learn a thing our belief in our competence, our arrogance, increases much faster than our competence. At some point, usually early in the learning curve, we realize we only know a tiny portion about that subject, and so our confidence, or arrogance, collapses. Then, once many years of further learning makes us actually competent, the resulting rise in our confidence is warranted. Since we all fall victim to this, or so Dunning and Kruger claim, is it such a stretch to think we, as a species, can as well? Moreover, it appears obvious that the tool of science has advanced humanity’s ability to manipulate the world, well beyond our ability to understand the implications, judged by recent revelations. Creating chimeras for example.
Science is a tool and like any other it can be used to create or destroy. The environmentalists used to understand this when they said that our actions have consequences for the environment… before the movement became a Trojan horse for communism. Those same people today lack that fundamental wisdom, when they demand the entire human race get an untested shot, consider salting the seas with iron to foster algae growth to soak up CO2, and speak seriously about culling the human race. Which is just crazy talk, taken seriously by people blinded to their limits, and made arrogant by the Dunning Kruger Effect. A chainsaw is pretty good at blocking, logging and generating emergency room visits. We don’t give a chain saw to a crazy… yet we allow Dr Moreau, to run the show.
Where will this predicted “discovery” happen? I suspect it will be in the understanding of life itself, the hard problem of consciousness or maybe even something in the realm of the paranormal? Look at the UFO, now renamed UAP, phenomenon. With the rise of pocket cameras on cellphones, we have seen a collapse in Big Foot video, but an explosion in UFOs. Things that, according to the USAF, violate the laws of physics as we know them. Therefore, either they are a form of mass hysteria, else they suggest a physics beyond that which we understand. These gaps in our knowledge, and the fact that a purely materialistic explanation of them seems far fetched, is why I believe our scientists, philosophers or a nutcase in a garage, will discover something that will shake the very foundations of our reality.
Mankind advanced rather sedately until the Enlightenment, which gave us the tool of science, and since then our knowledge has gone straight up. Along with our arrogance. We believe we, as a species, have a pretty good grip on reality. Our scientists say reality is purely mechanistic, a clockwork, and thus our existence in it, is pointless. Oh, there may be a few particles we have yet to isolate, like “gravitons,” a few measurements we have yet to whittle down, and the hard problem of consciousness, but other than that, our scientists believe they have reality well in hand. With that they have become arrogant. If reality is so simple that we can understand it, so well and so easily, doesn’t that make us gods? That arrogance will make the fall all that much harder. Yet fall we must… before we can really climb.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
